Steve Jones is the editor of SQLServerCentral.com and visits a wide variety of data related topics in his daily editorial. Steve has spent years working as a DBA and general purpose Windows administrator, primarily working with SQL Server since it was ported from Sybase in 1990. You can follow Steve on Twitter at twitter.com/way0utwest

Blogging seemed like a big deal in 2004. At the 2003 PASS Summit, we were told by Microsoft that they were setting up sqlJunkies as their external site and it would include blogs. We were less than impressed, but as more and more sites started adding them as a service, Brian thought we should as well. Andy wasn't thrilled with adding to our already overloaded plate, and I was split since I had a blog.

As I read through lots of blogs out there, it seemed that most of them were not really on topic. People posted lots of personal stuff about their lives and what they thought of something. Only a relative few were targeted as one topic blogs, most notably to me, Jonathan Schwatz's blog at Sun. And to me those often seemed more like marketing pieces that are probably edited pretty well by someone other than the author. If that's the case, write an article and post it in a normal publishing fashion. I guess blogging gets things out there quicker, but does it really matter to save a week?

Anyway, we started by using the blog item as a litmus test for new programmers. If they could integrate the .TEXT blogs into the site, then maybe they were worth hiring for other projects. The first go around of this didn't go so smoothly. I think it was mostly the mishmosh of stuff on the site that caused issues, but who knows. In any event, we got stalled with them half integrated and half not working so well. But since no one was clamoring for them, we let them go.

Then Brian started playing with the Community Server software, which had a blogs piece as well. That one get setup pretty quickly and while the look and feel wasn't great in that it doesn't integrate that well with the existing site, it worked. However again we didn't have any reason to add this in other than to waste a few more $$ on disk space and backups. So it sat, kind of waiting for us to do something.

Then I got an email from an MVP who said that he was looking to move his blog away from sqljunkies. They were recently sold to CMP or someone like that and I guess lots of Microsoft SQL Server guys wanted to move somewhere else. MSND offers blogs, but as with any corporate site, there's a few more rules there, so I contacted Brian and he worked fevereshly one night to get this place setup.

That's the blog story. Probably not terribly interested, but since I committed to this, I'll go ahead and try to make some entries and give my support. Forgive me if I don't post too often. I'd rather write articles and put them out there :)